The history of ideas discussed by Melvyn Bragg and guests including Philosophy, science, literature, religion and the influence these ideas have on us today.

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the measurement of time. Early civilisations used the movements of heavenly bodies to tell the time, then mechanical clocks emerged in Europe in the medieval period. For hundreds of years clocks were inaccurate but now atomic clocks are capable of keeping time to a second in 15 million years. Melvyn Bragg is joined by Kristen Lippincott, Former Director of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich; Jim Bennett, Director of the Museum of the History of Science at the University of Oxford and Jonathan Betts, Senior Curator of Horology at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.

This week we were joined by Mat “Wilto” Marquis. He’s now a full timer at Filament group in Boston who, while doing client work (like The Boston Globe, have you heard of it?), have done some amazing open source work for the modern web (e.g. major contributions to jQuery UI and Mobile). Mat chair’s the Responsive Images Community Group and has been front in center in the work (or shall we say, #hotdrama) toward dealing with responsive images in web design. We talk about (roughly in order):

News’n’Links’n’Drama

Kicktastic

Mike Evans: 23 and 1/2 hours: What is the single best thing we can do for our health?

RWD Calc

Coda 2

Axis

Q & A

What up with Filament’s Enhance.js (new beterness coming!)
Can we as authors just choose not to use features we don’t like?
I* s the RICG (the so-called “picture pushing club”) lazy? (Hint: no. Here’s a link to a recent compromise).

Should designers now be making all sites responsive? And thus prices going up?

How does a business like Wade’s Tree Service get decent SEO and avoid shady over-promising services?

Can we improve the aesthetics of websites during the loading process?
What up with Opera Mini?

What is / should we always be using Progressive JPGs?

Resources for staying on top of responsive web design: @RWD, @brad_frost

Cory Doctorow is a sci-fi author, hero of the open source and creative commons movements, and co-founder of boingboing.net.

In this exclusive event, Cory travels to Vivid Sydney from London to deliver a keynote on new challenges and frontiers for creators and consumers – asking us to question who we give our rights to - and how creators can best take advantage of a more connected world.

Following his keynote address, Cory joins anthropologist and Intel fellow Genevieve Bell, for a conversation exploring the future of culture, behaviour and technology, and why sharing and copying matters to makers.

Last week the OpenStreetMap community came together in Denver, Colorado for The State of the Map. Our editors dig into the news from the event and ponder the future of this crowdsourced map of the world.

This week we were joined by Nicole Sullivan, a long time web veteran, originator of OOCSS, CSS lint, and tons more. Nicole is definitely a thought leader in the modern web development world who is often ahead of us all. We’ve watched OOCSS start out as this abstract and highly criticized concept turn into a pretty commonplace practice on large sites. We talk about (roughly in order):

News’n’Links’n’Drama

Matt Wilcox on The Responsive Images Problem

IE 7 Tax – Company literally charging 6.8% more for products they sell online if browser is IE 7.

Q & A

Isn’t OOCSS just moving CSS bloat into HTML bloat?

Is there going to be a book on OOCSS?

Recognizing when many elements have the same classes, and making a new class that @extends the old ones.

Can you use the body element like you would a page-wrapping div?

What tools to we suggest for validation in the modern world, especially as part of a workflow?

Will our future be happy? Will we control our technology or will it control us? Writers Nick Harkaway and Simon Ings warn that we should not accept everything on offer. Ben Marcus’s new dystopian novel imagines what might happen if it all goes wrong.

We’re in an age when technological fact is stranger than fiction – so why are so many novelists devoting themselves to exploring the frontiers of thought? Nick Harkaway explains why it’s the novelist’s job to imagine the future, and how "an act of taking the brakes off the imagination" could even help the world to make the right choices as we hurtle into the future. Simon Ings, editor of Arc, a new magazine devoted to imagining the future, explains the importance of speculative thinking and the sadness of the modern world.

And Ben Marcus talks about the worst case scenario of his new novel, The Flame Alphabet, which imagines a dystopian future where adults are poisoned by the speech of their children, and in which words and writing, and even making signs, also become fatal.